Afterthoughts
by Crimson-Eyed-Angel99
Summary: Complete- Going up against the Snow Queen to save Kay was futile, so Gerda never tried. Now, inheriting some fragment of his curse has driven her back to the Homelands in search of the Snow Queen, where she is pulled into a search for an ancient weapon and quite possibly the rescue of Kay.
1. Afterthoughts Chapter 1

Spoilers within this fanfiction:

-Fables events related to Kay (up to War and Pieces events),

-some of the War against the Adversary events (though not the identity of the Adversary)

-the end of Jack of Fables.

Copyright: While many characters in this fanfiction are from the Fables series by Willingham/Vertigo, Gerda is from the original Snow Queen fable by Hans Christian Andersen (and never made it into Fables) and other characters will be identified as they appear.

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The house on Pleasant Street had all the creature comforts and none of the memories. It belonged to a German-immigrant family who had enough money to support a live-in nanny, and buy a piece of real estate in not-quite-New-York. Gerda had been living there ever since she came through, celebrating their Mundy birthday and Christmases and vacations. It was that type of job.

She'd come to them on her own, not through an agency, so there hadn't been a background check, which was good. Her crossing hadn't been strictly planned and she didn't have anything she needed to be 'American'. The family got this, accepted it, and she went about her business for them discreetly. No trouble about her past. If that was what it was.

Soon after she started living here, she had made up the term 'fringe Fable'—a Fable who just merged with the Mundys and forgot the Homelands they lost. There were reasons: they had never been very important anyway, or had failed their stories—their quest now was to forget. And Gerda was doing just fine with that. Sometimes there was a twinge, like when she got red flats for Christmas or had to read the kids her own happy ending'd fairy tale. But just fine, overall.

Until she walked into the kids' bedroom one night to tuck them in, promising their parents would be in after a moment to say goodnight to them. She was straightening from picking up Marnie's teddy bear when the mirror above the bureau exploded.

"GERD!" Stefan shouted, already half out of bed, his bare seven-year-old's feet almost touching the floor.

"Stay there!" She snapped at him, already picking her way towards the closet and the mess of glass, glad she had on her flats. From the wreckage, the mirror had shattered from within. Pressure, maybe? She wondered as she opened the closet door and examined the kids' shoes. What would put such pressure on the mirror? The frame had no sign of sudden wear or stress. There were no projectiles lying on the floor and this wasn't the type of neighborhood where people got shot. She headed back to the beds, shoes in hand.

"Stay in bed, Stefan, there's glass on the floor. And don't let Marnie up." She set the shoes on the bed. "I don't want to see you unless it's an emergency. I'm going to get your parents. Don't let Marnie off the bed."

" 'kay," Stefan said mildly as Gerda stepped out into the hall. She made it no further than the first decorative mirror. There were several of them spread around the hall, most small. They made up for their smallness by exploding, throwing their shards at her as people thought porcupines threw their quills. Shielding her face as they went off, she heard them continue as she ran, one after another. Was someone shooting?

When she reached the end and looked down the hall, every single mirror had gone off. When 'Dad' opened the door to the master bedroom, one hand was cloaked in gun-filled darkness, the other holding a power flashlight.

"Gerda?"

The mirror directly across from him did nothing.

"Don't come in the hall!" she babbled. He wore shoes, but remained obediently where he was, waiting for an explanation.

"The mirrors are exploding. The kids are all right but you should really go to them."

"The one in our room is fine. Do you need some help cleaning up? Have you heard someone break in?"

She started walking towards him, running a hand through her hair to check for glass. The flashlight in his hand caught the mirror face and she saw it tremble.

"No, I haven't heard anyone."

It kept quivering but she chalked it up to reflections and kept walking until it snapped and threw itself like a great blanket over 'Dad.'

He ducked, an arm over his head, and shot the ceiling, but he had not shot the mirror. Gerda stumbled back on her feet, hearing the little rain of glass particles, and knew with a certain numb clarity that this was a Fable thing. Unexplained things happened around Fables. All the mirrors in the house exploding unexplainably when you passed—when you had grown up in the shadow of a mirror? Of a curse? There was a private little fear in her, always had been, that what happened to Kay could have happened to her just as easily… so she trembled when she stepped forward. Spotted the blood on his face and the mirrors glimmering further down the hall.

Retreat. You can't let Mundys know Fable things and this is a Fable thing.

"I-I'm—"

"Gerda, what's going on?" Mrs. Arnold was at the door, one hand self-consciously clutching at her nightdress front. She spotted her husband. "Nathan!"

"I-I'm… excuse me please."

-and she ran. The mirror over the coat rack popped like a dramatic effect as she fled into the street. The effect didn't extend to windows, street lights, or glass in general, so her flight down the street was strangely silent. She kept expecting to hear the roar of a motorcycle, like in a movie the kids had wanted to see a couple of years before, or a wizard to come along dousing the streetlights. But that was magic, not Fables. Fables had to take care of themselves. She kept seeing a spray of shards in her mind; falling all over the life she'd tried to make. Remembering everything but especially Kay—

Okay. Breathe. Stop running. Slowly, she did. You just left everything behind but your silly red shoes; you're going to need to go back in the morning and get everything anyway. Right now they probably think you broke all the mirrors so you could take off with their game consoles and GPS's.

She called 911 and reported the incident, then spent the night on a park bench, her heart thudding against her chest too fast to go home.

When she turned up in the morning, they had her things ready. Dad had needed three stitches, but it didn't look like there would be a scar. They were confused, not angry— and asked, not begged or demanded, for an explanation. She got the feeling they would have let her stay, if she had wanted or asked for such a privilege. The kids would be upset but she wasn't safe for them. Even in the confines of the park, she had broken four public bathroom mirrors, various rearview mirrors, and the compact in her own purse. Mirrors just broke.

It continued into New York City, three months later, when she was up to her knees in unemployment. She had tried being a waitress and promptly realized how popular décor mirrors were. Four broken mirrors defied coincidence and she had decided to leave. A brief stint in retail followed that—nine breakages in her first shift. Even freelancing with a make-up company—no one wanted pieces of glass in their eyeshadow.

Before long, she didn't have enough money to make the next month's rent.

That's when she started looking for Fabletown.

###

This is a (completed) multi-chapter story, updated with 3 chapters on Mondays until completion.

Explanation: I wrote it because it feels like Kay gets royally screwed over in the series and because I like the Snow Queen story too much to leave it at that.


	2. Afterthoughts Chapter 2

When she had first come through, even as stumbling and unique as her sojourn had been, her guide said there was a place Fables were congregating. A 'Fabletown.' It would be near where they came through into the Mundy, in a busy city called New York. Go there, ask for Cole. He was running things and would help her settle in. Squinting at a piece of aged parchment marked with charcoal, she memorized the name and unfamiliar form of the address.

This was a good idea. Better if she had taken the advice straightaway, rather than camping in the woods near the gate for two months, waiting to see if Kay came through—but that's what she had done. Lying awake in the darkness, repeating the address a hundred times to herself, she'd waited.

She finally gave up, went to New York, but never found Fabletown. It always seemed like fate that she couldn't find it—somehow, they knew she'd never saved Kay, that the fable wrapped around them was somehow wrong and they were the erring elements.

So it wasn't with much hope that she began seeking Fabletown again, feeling distinctly like Inigo Montoya, following the erratic movements of a magic sword. Four days in, she found herself circling the same shelled-out husk of a neighborhood like an albatross, though she didn't remember turning aside once. Was the place magically cloaked?

She stopped at this thought, people passing around her with their heads to their phones, lives in hand. There was nowhere in this city that wasn't crowded as a duck pond in spring. She was good-as-Mundy to them— how would Fables even see something odd to know to welcome her in? If it was cloaked, she was doomed.

Time for Google. A stop back at the apartment to fetch her laptop and she went to a coffeeshop. Sure enough, O.K. Cole's business address (the only one available) was based in that abandoned neighborhood. The only other connections were 'S. White' and 'Bigby Wolf,' neither of which had filled out their profiles. A quick check on Bigby revealed that he owned a ranch that refused all visitors on pain of 'being torn apart by vicious canines.' That, and an email address. She sent a carefully-worded email off to the man, closed the laptop and put her head down on the table.

The next morning, they sent the redhead and the pickup.

"You're late for an appointment," the woman said. Social pleasantries were apparently out of her scope: she didn't offer her name or ask for Gerda's.

"I didn't know I had one." Gerda began pulling together her purse, notes, pen.

"Bigby said you were asking questions. And you've never been to Fabletown?"

"That—that neighborhood? I thought I knew where it was…"

"Yeah, Mr. Dark did a number on the—leave that."

"What, the laptop?"

"Ours are fine, but we don't like people bringing them in."

"Sure, sure." She replaced it on the bed hurriedly. "Who am I meeting with?"

"Frau Totenkinder—no, Bellflower. That's what she goes by now." They tramped down the carpeted stairs, Gerda running her hand along the guardrail.

"And she's…?"

"Witchiest ally we've got. Retired now, and married, but I think she knew Kay, if that's your blind man, pretty well. She was very insistent on seeing you, once she got the email."

"Kay IS here then?" She almost lost her grip on the rail, walking faster. It had been such a long time that she tried to talk about Fable things; the conversation violated twelve of her personal rules. "And how does this Frau woman know? I emailed—"

"Frau gets information from everyone's email, one way or another."

"But she knows Kay?" The thought still sparked like a firework in her head, drawing her attention. "We left the Homelands separately, he wasn't blind when I know him. I didn't even know he was here! How did he escape the—Homelands? When?"

The redhead weighted her words carefully as they stepped out into the bright sunshine gleaming on the sidewalk. The pickup was conspicuously double-parked. "He lived in the Mundy, operated as a consulting Fable for people we didn't trust. That's all Bigby told me when I came to get you. They used to talk about security issues and testing new people. Nobody but Bigby, Frau, and maybe Beast knew him well."

'Lived.' 'Used to.' It didn't take a scientist to figure out the way the narrative had run.

"But he's not here anymore," Gerda said quietly. "Kay."

"No. He was missing when we evacuated Fabletown. On the bright side, you know, we never found a body. Step up."

Gerda obeyed, only glancing up momentarily as the rearview mirror and both side mirrors shattered. The woman blinked at them. Then at her.

"Sorry. Yes, that was me," Gerda said, with a little embarrassment.

"Evil Queen complex?" the redhead commented.

"Just unlucky."

"Only there are a lot of mirrors in the world." She started the car. "And breaking all of them's a little more unlucky than the Mundy community tolerates."

"Which is why I have to fix this soon. I want to be a Fable about as much as any Fable wants to be Mundy."

That said, Gerda turned her face to the window to watch where they were going, though she would probably never have to find this place again. It was better than thinking about Kay. 'Presumed dead'? Really? He was dead, and he had been friends with the best witch the Fables had on their side? Kay had never had the best luck with witches, but that was no excuse to let him die like that. She had to grit her teeth to keep from ripping into the admittedly-innocent red-haired woman.

Ask this Frau person. Hold your horses until then.


	3. Afterthoughts Chapter 3

"Not much of a Fable, are you?" the witch said when they first met.

Which wasn't for several hours anyway. At the redhead's direction, Gerda had mucked out the multi-colored horses' stalls, getting into a rather hostile conversation about childrearing with a donkey, and finally escaping to the river. The debate had given her a headache and she was less than happy to see a twenty-something woman emerge from the nearby woods, clad in a simple green dress.

"Frau Totenkinder?" she asked.

"Bellflower."

This suited the woman standing before Gerda, young and pretty like a fledgling goddess, but 'Frau Totenkinder' was a kinder name in Gerda's mind. It spoke of home, a name with weight and power behind it; a history, and history certainly seemed to be what she was running towards with this venture into Fabletown.

"Kay… mentioned me, then?" Gerda asked. Saying his name aloud brought on a slight rush of guilt but it was years old. The feeling deadened as Frau shook her head.

"Kay didn't mention anyone in the Homelands but the Snow Queen. I've just done my research. A childhood friend of his, when he was taken, you looked for him for a year then… vanished."

"No one knows that—"

"I do. I can also tell you that he's dead."

"Nothing I didn't already know," Gerda said, fighting to keep a snarl out of her voice. " 'Missing' when you evacuated Fabletown and regarded as dead ever since. You know he had to escape from the Snow Queen to get out of the Homelands, right? What kind of treatment is that, to one of your own?"

"No worse than your treatment of him."

"I can face up to that. You evacuated and nobody went looking for him. You had to have some kind of roster, a checklist of residents. You all made it out of the Homelands, but not out of a neighborhood? What kind of an operation are you running?"

"I am not answerable to you. You weren't there, and you don't know the situation," Frau replied.

"No, but Kay did, and you did. His friend." The woman didn't blink. "And if you're a witch, so you know people. And people who don't evacuate during an evacuation are either stupid, doing something noble, or can't leave. Kay was insufferably logical, and didn't see the point in nobility, so you abandoned him."

"Did you know he had a habit of gouging out his own eyes?" the witch asked. Gerda's words stuck in her throat, and she choked a little before she could reply.

"…what?"

"The man lived out in the Mundy. He ruined my efforts to help him and had he been of a stronger personality, he probably would have blackmailed us all with what he saw in Bigby, in myself. He was a consulting Fable, and not a well-liked one. But I have not called you here to reminisce about a dead man's insanity."

Gerda said nothing.

"He's only connected to all of this if you squint and you'll need all your eyes about you while you're back in the Homelands. The side of the angels is going to demand a little more of you than a Mundy-level intelligence."

Gerda bit down on a host of snappy responses, remembering the redhead's earlier injunction that she be 'polite' when she met with Frau. "Ms. Bellflower, I'm assuming you're going to tell me why I have to go back to the Homelands, but before you do, know that I know next to nothing about Fables. You would certainly be better qualified for any mission in the Homelands. Or here, for that matter. Why leave it to me?"

"Because I've paid my dues to the Fables and will not trouble myself playing the interfering ally everyone gratefully consigned to the woods. I told them of your curse, opened the gateway you'll be taking to the capital, and that is quite enough. You know enough to know that we fought a war to get those closed? No? We did. Bigby will lead you there and, once through, you will go to the capital, destroy a weapon the Snow Queen has been developing for centuries, and bring back all the information you can."

Gerda's mouth dropped open; she was sure of it. She couldn't even stammer out a reaction for a moment, which Frau took to go into detail.

"Of course, they'll have a packet of information for you at the Farm, as well as gear. The 13th Floor has established that the weapon we've been searching for is linked to your 'curse.' Your curse was the first lead they have had in years and I had to bring it to their attention. It's a very powerful weapon, if not all-powerful, and forged through some ancient contract we haven't been able to unravel."

"And you're throwing me at it because…? Sorry, I don't follow."

"It's a magical weapon. There are always rules that govern those, some weakness in the design and it is old as the Snow Queen herself. The contract is beyond the reinforcement of her magic and a thread of that magic has stretched out to touch you. Something about your curse is that weakness and there is no better time to strike than now, with the empire only lurching to its feet. Shoving it off-balance should be child's play. With your curse to help… it may be enough for you simply to be near it. Intelligence we gained from Boy Blue suggests that Lumi is not above conversation, so if you can safely extract information from her, do so."

"But why me? Why am I cursed? I mean, it's not as if I've ever had any direct contact with the Snow Queen."

"No, only Kay, but your story intersects with theirs and that may be why the weapon is related to you. It is beyond the 13th Floor's scope to say for sure."

"You think he's there?" she said, puzzled.

"I can only say that he was good as dead when I saw him. And even if he is there, you may have to kill him to achieve your goal. This is more important than crushes or reconciliation."

"If you've done your research, you know I'm experienced at abandoning Kay."

"Which is why I know you're capable."

On that stinging note, the witch turned to go; steps even and unhurried carried her back into the woods.

Gerda couldn't help but call out: "And if I do all that, what do I win?"

"All the world and a pair of skates, as your tale goes. What do you think? You stop breaking mirrors, with the destruction of the weapon, your curse should end as well. You can join Fabletown, if that's what you want, or go back to Mundy life and continue that scintillating career wiping noses."

The witch was gone before she could issue a retort and glares did nothing. She wanted to say she had been waiting for looking for something better (she hadn't), or that she had a rich life with the Mundys (not really); but the truth of the matter was that 'waiting' was the only word for what she'd been doing. Without motivation, and with plenty of time, life became something that happened to Mundys.

Even so!

She yanked off a shoe and hurled it after the woman, over the river, where it promptly went 'splish.' Deciding that there was no point in keeping one shoe, she sent the other one flying after it. That was for Kay and the Snow Queen's weapon and the sum total of every static decision she'd made since leaving the Homelands.

-at which point the shoes came bobbling gently back to shore. She sank to her knees and collected them. Damn everything that had brought her to this point of childish shoe throwing. She remembered doing it when Kay had first gone missing, asking the river if it had taken him. But nothing meant anything here: shoes floated because they had rubber soles and everything came up coincidence.

Maybe in the Homelands, it would mean something again.


	4. Afterthoughts Chapter 4

Bigby turned out to be an oft-grimacing man who had to be detached from several children to take her to 'the gap.' They didn't speak much on the trip, since he kept her before him, eyes cold stone on her back. Either he didn't trust her or didn't approve of her, or didn't like her, or had never liked anyone ever. It might be all of the above.

"So, you knew Kay?" she ventured, after twenty minutes of walking and silence.

"Yeah."

"Did he ever talk about his—"

"Nope."

"Or how he became blind?"

"Only know the basics and the shard, just like everyone else."

"Was he happy, at least?" In the aftermath of Frau's 'insanity' comment, this was a silly question but maybe—maybe Bigby had seen him at other times…

It gave the stalking man pause "I saw him happy, a few times. Sight made him miserable. He'd be pleased when he'd dug out his eyes again."

The thought of that made a lump of sympathetic pain gather in Gerda's throat. "And the Snow Queen—?"

"Didn't talk about her. We're here." He slid Gerda's pack off his shoulders easily and doled out instruction by rote memory as Gerda looked warily at the dirt path. It seemed to start from nowhere and lead into the trees, heading due north. "Stay on the path, walk straight through. Don't step off for four hours or 13th Floor says it'll warp the passage and you could end up anywhere. Might be cold. There's a coat."

She took the thick garment from him absently, still eyeing the trees as she pulled it on. "Do you know where it comes out…?"

"Not a clue."

"And you're not coming." She picked up the weighty pack, hoping that whoever had packed it had a good idea of what she would need. Heaven knew she had no idea what she might face. Bigby pushed a tightly-folded map, about the size and weight of a matchbox car, into her hand.

"Not my job."

"But—"

"I got cubs and things to do, sweetheart. Good luck." And he shooed her onto the path. He didn't even tell her to start walking; he just vanished into the trees. She knew she could follow him, but it wouldn't have gotten her out of the situation, the curse, or the fact it felt like the first meaningful thing she'd done for the past eight years.

-plus, when she meandered experimentally towards the edge of the path, fierce growls came from the undergrowth.

Fine. She shouldered the pack and headed north.

#

It was no strangeness for Kay to wake up in a cold room. His bedroom was cold; his childhood in the Homelands had been cold; there was little in his life that didn't have the touch of ice.

However, it was a strange thing to wake up from dead. Also, strange to see. The room made no provision for humans, it being large and arching and composed entirely of shaped ice, and Kay the only soft thing in it. Every wall was an assault of mirrors, all of them built into the wall with no frames just rectangular gaps in the wall where their surfaces stretched. Hundreds of untroubled lakes of glass.

They were not aligned at right angles to one another, but mosaic'ed, as if someone had flung them all at the wall in a fit of fury—and they had stuck. Since no one was coming, Kay moved to examine them, kicking something across the floor as he did. A piece of broken glass.

Kay glanced around reluctantly, assuring himself that all the mirrors were perfect. They were. He dropped to the floor, out of the mirrors' eyes, to investigate the floor. This was not a lone piece of glass—there was another, and another, and another. Off in the corner, a massive pile of them. He circled the room, looking for a broken mirror of such magnitude and noticed quickly that some pieces had been fitted at the edges of the room. The floor was subtly depressed from the walls to accommodate them and thin, faint lines radiated just under the surface, as jagged and various as the glass shards.

He let these alone and paced to what looked like the outline of a door. He ran his fingers over it, trying to ignore the image of his doppelganger doing the same. There were at least four mirrors directly in his field of vision, but this was where the door was.

Pulling out the dark glasses (miraculously unbroken) in his shirt pocket, he let the narcissus-white room turn black. All right then, search for the doorframe. Fingers did all the work here; his cane hadn't made the trip. Probably buried under the rubble back in Fabletown—but that was not for thinking of.

Fingers, wall, exploring.

He found the ridge of a door, explored it all round with his fingers. It was welded shut with ice.

"Oh for crying out loud—Lumi. …Lumi!"

He said it twice because the first time it did not echo. Shouting didn't change it. The puzzle shards clattered when he kicked at them, yet his voice would not echo. As if it were too big to hear him, all involved with something more important, but the shards would echo.

Kay felt his way around the room, discovering that several very short caves connected to it. Brief, one-room affairs, they all had mirrors on the wall and looped back to the main room in their design. No furniture, no sign that they were meant to be inhabited or had ever been. The glass puzzle was always visible below the blackness of his glasses. It was too tricky not to look at light in his peripheral vision; the temptation was too great.

Somberly, he took off the glasses, eyes fixed on the floor to avoid the mirror walls, and selected one of the pieces at his feet. Slippery, it began to melt almost immediately in his palm and he knelt, brushing away the other shards surrounding his feet. It had been a long time since he used his eyes… yet fingers wouldn't work on tracing the interconnected lines buried in the ice - thin and grey-white, like the images of an X-ray against a light box. He was good at seeing the dark that outlined white and where none might've existed for others, patterns emerged for Kay.

Even with this skill, it took fifteen minutes to find the first piece's slot. He set it into place as carefully as a magic pebble before looking with hesitancy at the room around him. A thousand mirrored Kays looked back, mired in evil and in a thousand different ways deserving of the suffering they found here; of this and more.

But one winked out.

There were, if Kay had cared to count, exactly one thousand and one mirrors; now there were one thousand. The knowledge would have comforted and dismayed him. As it was, he stared at where the mirror had been until the vision in its surrounding mirrors became too much to bear.

Above, a tiny thousand men bent to the task of repairing a shattered floor, the only merit of which was that, once placed, the pieces stayed set in place regardless of kicking or prying. Kay realized this quickly and worked with less care.

He was only doing it to repair the décor anyway. This many mirrors could drive a man insane.


	5. Afterthoughts Chapter 5

Three miles along the path, after exiting the four-hour long passage into an unfamiliar forest, Gerda had found the angels. By six miles, she was arguing with them. She wasn't even sure how they'd gotten into her party of one.

The pair of them had been sitting off to the side of the path, perched on fallen frostbitten trees, like posh gentlemen at a party waiting on a lady hostess. Posh, eight foot tall gentlemen with silver-white hair and robes (with pants) and swords and wings. At the hypothetical party, they could have served as bouncers. They introduced themselves as Burke and Kramer.

She was having quite a time remembering which was which and suspected they had picked up the names merely out of deference to her humanity.

"And Bigby sent you," she said incredulously, after they had followed her two miles. "Good grief, I was hardly at the farm for a full day!"

One of them had taken on the role of explaining all the intricacies of their situation. It was this one that spoke now. "We approached Bigby when you were dispatched to the mission. Otherwise, he would have served as your guardian himself."

That made for a frightening mental picture. "But why do I need one at all? The Adversary's gone and while the Snow Queen's awake, the rest of the capital is supposed to still be asleep. That's what my packet said, and Frau thought that I would be let out somewhere uninhabited."

"Not entirely uninhabited. Everywhere in the Homelands poses a risk and we need you to get where you need to be. It's unfortunate that Cinderella is otherwise engaged, but the pair of us are more than capable of making up for her."

"Do you know where I'm to go, then?"

"Bodyguards, not cartographers, unfortunately. Bigby should have given you a map." The pair easily glided along next to her. Both of them preferred flying to walking and could hover impressively, wings motionless. She didn't want to tell them she had never had cause to use a map and, since she didn't know where the path had let her out, the map was all but useless anyway.

"So, Kramer—" she began.

"I'm Burke, actually."

"Is north the right direction?"

"If you believe that's where he is; I have no other suggestion to propose."

" 'He'?" She stopped in the middle of the road and looked at Burke. "I'm not looking for a 'he.' I was told to go looking for the Snow Queen."

"Oh." The statement didn't faze her companion in the slightest. "We only thought, with your original story unfinished—"

"Do you know where he is?" she demanded.

"Yes."

The answer was so simply put she almost ran over it. "He's dea—what did you say?"

"Yes, we know," Kramer said. "Also, point of interest, gypsies."

And she was travelling with two dangerous-looking winged men with swords, in a land full of goblins. "Hide!"

Without comment or protest, the pair vanished. No word of where, they just faded into the forest and she faced the travelling people on the road. They were loaded down with supplies and winter gear, heading south like a collection of black rags, scarves and bits of long dark hair fluttering in the wind. Natural shyness and anxiety made her duck her head to let them pass, but they didn't.

"We rarely meet another traveler!" a gaunt-faced yet jolly woman said. She was leading the group of five, two couples and a solitary man. "And heading north too, what a trek. Do you have food? Shelter? What a lovely coat." And her fingers were plucking at the unfamiliar texture of synthetic fabrics and blends. "How strange!"

Gerda drew away, trying to be polite but distinctly unsettled. "Yes, it is, and I have plenty of supplies, I think."

"You think?" The woman analyzed her as if she could see the chill developing in Gerda's fingers and toes. "Check, dear girl. The cold only gets worse as you head north. We have just come from there."

"You might have a point, I'll check." Gerda pulled the pack off her back and beginning to root through it for the first time. "If you have extra gloves, or a scarf, I may be able to trade something…"

Her seeking fingers closed around soft plush; someone had already packed two pairs of gloves (two? Why two?), and two scarves, and provisions enough for—surprise of surprise—two.

"I've actually enough to share—"

The gypsies were shaking their heads, the woman making a kindly dismissive gesture. "Clearly, you are fated to meet with another, and we could not take from that. Are you journeying to—"

"How far do you go?" the solitary man asked, interrupting.

"North," she replied nervously. "I don't know more than that. I'm seeking the Snow Queen."

This made the woman scowl, cloaked so she thought Gerda couldn't see, but the man thrilled at the answer. "Are you seeking Jack?"

"Who?"

"Her son, Jack of Fables. The child, not the father, who's a bit of a bastard." He was speaking quickly and Gerda tried to look interested. The man's companions were bustling about with their packs, making a great show of being ready to leave right now, and the man was not shy about ignoring them, even when the woman began plucking at his sleeve, catching it, letting it drop, catching it again, like a bird.

"Er, no," Gerda said. "No, I hadn't thought of going to him. Or heard of him. Is he a member of her court…?"

"An adventurer. His whereabouts change constantly, but her kingdom is usually farther than her son's adventuring domain, that I've known of. He would be able to get you in to see her."

"He's a good man, then?"

"Better morals than his parents', which is more than can be said of most."

"Where can I find him?"

"Our tales are old, dear," the woman interrupted. "Months gone since we heard of him and our companion here is only obsessed."

"It beats the tale of the woeful bear, three nights in the telling," the solitary man said with more than a hint of bitterness. "And I do know where Jack—"

"Oh!" the woman turned to Gerda with a predatory gleam in her eye, ready to make mischief. "The woeful bear, have you heard that one? It's very funny. Join us a day, we shall share stories."

"I actually need to keep moving," Gerda said. These people unsettled her with their interruptions and the feud that seemed to be brewing. No reason to get caught up in it if she didn't have to. "But I would like to know where Jack is. If he knows where the Snow Queen is, or could introduce me—"

"He had her powers once," the solitary man said, before the woman could answer. "Serves to reason that he would know her, wherever she was. But the path may be complicated, and you're new to the area—it would be better not to divert you from the path to the capital." He was eyeing her in near-apology, a prankster retracting his statement.

"But I'm wandering. I don't know where I am right now, don't know the woman I'm going to see, and once I get there, she could just, I don't know, shut the door in my face. I need this Jack, if he'll get me in. And if it's so difficult for me to find him on my own—can't you just accompany me?"

He struggled for words a second. "The last reports had of Jack had him in Howandaland, hunting a dragon – beyond that, I don't know where he would be. And your best bet for finding Lumi is in the capital." This he said with a definitive air, as if saying 'can't miss it.'

"And she has woken. Right?"

"She's woken?" the solitary man blinked several times, looking surprised. He got over it quickly though. "Er, then, your task is simple. The capital is right off the road—"

"Why can't you come?" Because he hadn't answered that question and she was getting to think she would like to know him better without the woman tugging at his sleeve. He might enjoy not being with these people too.

"Yes, why don't you?" the woman said, then shifted her focus to Gerda. "Travelling companions make everything better, and for a girl alone on the road… we could all come north with you! Do exchange your name with us-"

"I don't think you should come," the solitary man interrupted. "It's too long a road and we'd bore you incredibly. We'll go now. Good luck."

"But a girl alone!" the woman protested.

"I'm not alone," Gerda assured the woman. "Two of my companions just stepped away a moment. Don't worry about me."

"Keep moving," the man assured her brightly, something in her statement having brightened his mood. "Stray not far from the path, as there are old enchantments and entrapments here."

"Oh, then my companions should be…"

"Right here." And Burke and Kramer came roaring up out of the forest, as dramatically as if they had magnificent motorcycles hidden under their suits. The swords had been bared, with queer ridged blades. The couples bristled, drawing away from the pair, and Gerda thought the solitary man's eyes were going to pop out of his head. The angels gestured fearsomely to the couples, who circled blackly around the solitary man of their group.

"Away!" Kramer ordered.

Black fluttering and protests. "We only took what was ours!" the woman protested.

"He made no contract, nor knew the trap," Burke said. Both glided forward, the temperature seeming to rise with the advance of their swords. The couples skittered backwards, leaving the man alone. Even he looked about to back away.

"Not knowing is no excuse!" the woman shouted, though her eyes darted away, nervous in losing the battle. "We've taken many that way!"

"And you keep them in their ignorance only through such state. You have no claim here."

And the couples shrank into their flapping scarves and coats, taking to the forms of crows. Gerda hadn't seen a transformation before and she didn't want to watch or think about the process after it was over. They flew, screeching blandishments, into the trees and left the angels with Gerda and the solitary man. The latter looked about to faint and kept touching his throat reflexively.

He spoke in a whisper. "I have been in their care some four months and that was all I had to do?"

"They bank on innocence," Burke said gently.

"I only stepped off the path a moment. I was on my way to be married, she probably thinks I'm—they learned my name by trickery and forced me to come. Like a dog, and I have been tramp ever since. And I could order them away?"

Gerda had heard of such curses but never seen one in working order. And they had only known his name_..._

"You were open to being captured, heading towards a wedding. They prey on such sentiments. You were not to be blamed for giving your name." Having said this, Burke stepped back to include Gerda in the conversation. "We did not act earlier, for some choose curses to achieve power."

"That Rumplestiltskin incident," Kramer muttered.

"The fairies tried to take care of that one," Burke said dismissively, though Kramer didn't seem comforted. The solitary man—

"What is your name?" Gerda said abruptly. "I'm Gerda, if that helps, but I can't keep calling you nothing if you're going to be travelling with me."

"Travelling with—oh, no. No, Gerda, thank you, but I have a fiancée who thinks I've—I have to get home. It was idle chatter, what I said. I'm sorry, I can't really go with you…"

"It's fine." Engaged. At least he would get a happy ending out of this. "Glad we could help you."

"Thank you," he said, with the emphasis of someone realizing he hadn't said it yet. "Thank you, so much. It's a bend in the path at Bridgedown Circle to get to the capital, to the left. And the capital will be four days' journey after that. Don't stay there long, the gobs have regular patrols and there's a comprehensive crime network."

"And I'll mind the dragon too," she joked, shouldering the pack again.

"Don't scoff – rumor hasn't included the outcome of that meeting with the dragon yet. Be careful."

"Thank you, all the same. You've been helpful."

He grinned, the meekness of new freedom. "As you've been to me. Take care. My path leads me in the other direction."

She let him jog the opposite way, waiting to move on until he was safely out of sight. The angels then sheathed their swords, looking proud and ominous—with good reason, Gerda now realized.

"Annnnnd that's why you're here."

"Yes, among other things. Consequences are unmerciful here. Do you want to press on now?"

"You said you knew where Kay was."

"Yes."

She waited.

"In the Snow Queen's castle," Burke said, taking the hint quicker than Kramer. On the whole, Burke seemed the quicker to answer questions.

"…is he dead?"

There followed a moment of odd and telling silence. The moment stretched into half a mile before Gerda finally got fed up and demanded: "well, is he?"

"…we don't really know. We think so, but he shouldn't exist at all if that is the case."

She said nothing in response to this, only walking faster. They fell in behind her and she found she liked the feeling of being at the helm.

"Are we pursuing Jack, then?" Burke asked, after another half a mile of this.

"If he's in the capital. I'd normally be the last one to propose attending a family reunion between an adventurer and the Adversary's right hand, but we've no choice." There would be no way to get in and destroy the weapon if she couldn't get past the doorman/doorgoblin. It was just a matter of finding Jack, coercing (or bribing) him to come back with her, and sneaking off to find the 'weapon' while they talked. Gerda was aware of the plan's terribleness.

Unfortunately, no one else had any suggestions.


	6. Afterthoughts Chapter 6

Forty-two mirrors later...

That was quite a statement, for a floor littered with hundreds of shards, yet the room was no less oppressive. The remaining mirrors seemed (to Kay) to swell with evil as their compatriots dimmed, knowing the cost paid for each other dimming.

Kay had little need to sleep and none to eat, beyond the thought that the latter would have been a nice distraction from the puzzle. His eyes hurt from scouring its patterns and lines, his back and legs hurt from being crouched on the floor, and from constantly getting up and down to pace, piece in hand, to place it. It was good that this room was large, because it composed his entire world.

A world he'd gone over twice now, trying to fit this piece. Kay tossed it to the floor and walked over to the door, sitting down and letting his head thunk back against it. He'd been over the room twice, scooting it around the room until the piece fit, jostling all the other pieces on the off chance something would click. But it had to be with intent. The pieces knew, somehow, that the orientation was off, that he didn't care, and so nothing happened.

He fixed his gaze on the door, deliberately not looking at the guilt-soaked figures staring back at him from in the mirrors. On went the glasses and with them, some pristine sense of detachment from his situation. Not much of one, but he could pretend. He lurched off the ground and headed over to work on opening the door, one of the few tasks in the room that didn't require vision.

Kay had taken up the habit of using body heat to melt the weld until his fingers were too cold to be of any use, then he had either gone back to the puzzle. This time, he had thought of using a piece of ice as leverage and was working at it.

The blindness was an aid and a detriment: he didn't realized the ice had cut his hands until he took the glasses off.

Wrapping his socks (they weren't keeping out the cold) around his hands, he continued etching ice into ice. It cut a little into the weld and he began whispering to it. He could feel the change if he paused, pressed it with his thumb.

"A little more, a little more…"

No cold though. No cold at all.

"Maybe it's cause you're dead, old man," he muttered to himself. The sound of his own voice unnerved him; it just laid there. Like a dead thing, like something so old it didn't bear remembering, like memories of the end of Fabletown. Those were confined to rubble, a fearsome voice, and he remembered dying.

–not the bits that came after, though; the working bits, the building of something. It was too bizarre to remember being a zombie and Kay blocked it as much as he could. But blocking what little he remembered of Fabletown meant he shoved everything in the back of his mind and with it, who he was and what he was doing here.

"Strange, clever Kay," he told himself. "The blind man. Kay, and the Snow Queen, and Ger—and Kay. I know Bigby, and Frau, and Beast, and Cinderella, and Mowgli, and Snow."

The little mantra of names and identities was fruitless; when he tried to sleep, he saw the puzzle lines and nothing but them in his mind. He took off the glasses now, checking the door again, and saw there had formed another layer of—

"Lumi, this isn't playing fair!"

Ice. Thickening with the newly-exposed gap, layering itself, undoing all he managed to achieve. He swore, and those words fell flat too. No reverberation, even; dead things in a dead room where nothing—he pounded it with his fist once, expecting nothing, and was surprised to find that the ice cracked.

Putting all his weight against the door, feet sliding slowly on the slick floor, he pushed at the door with slow, aching movements. It swung—

And he stepped out into a hallway that was so cold it took his breath away. The drop in temperature chilled his lungs, sending him into a fit of coughing, and he stumbled on with one hand on the wall. Operating without sight was nothing new and in his ears roared the sound of wind, high and distant, blowing somewhere in the castle.

"Good, now just… leave…"

But when he stopped coughing and could peer at his surroundings, the hallway revealed none of its secrets. It wasn't bigger than one could explore in a day, but it was a palace. It could take hours to find a way out if he was buried deep in its chambers and he had no doubt that Lumi had done just that. At least there weren't mirrors here. Placing a hand on the wall, he moved down the hall, turning down none of the inviting chambers. All had doors and he didn't have time to figure out their locks. Once she found out he was gone (and she would), she would come after him, so he moved fast.

The hall kept three leagues in front of him as he moved on, ice-covered wall rippling with formations under his fingers. The cold, shocking at first, had quickly numbed his fingers and though he could still feel it, it had lessened. The distant wind moaned on. Did the woman live here, dealing with that racket constantly? It rose and fell like an airy tide; only at one point did he feel its blast directly and it didn't pause, sweeping down the hall with some purpose in mind.

It took him a moment after that to realize someone had spoken.

"Does she know you're here?" someone asked. Kay turned and sought the voice, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground for an indication of shoes. You could learn a lot from shoes and they showed you nothing of past sin. Unless they were covered in blood, but you'd see that anyway. There were no shoes in the immediate vicinity.

"Where are you?" Kay asked, turning about.

"The doorway," the voice replied and Kay looked to the nearest one. There, traced only in the faintest of outlines, was a pair of shoes. They had no filled color, merely hollow contours delineating where the body ended. Kay looked up without hesitation into the eyes of a former hero. The man's hair looked like it had been exceptionally fair to start with – now it was a transparent shadow. His face still had enough shade and light to look human but… little else. Murders—justified or unjustified, the man had been deceived before—floated like specters over his head but they were not half so bad as looking on the deeds of the living. On the whole, this man had not been evil.

"You're a ghost," Kay said.

"Jack the adventurer, actually. The younger. And does my mother know you're here?"

"Yes, I think. She and I have an old arrangement where I come here and provide specialized services." The lie came quick; trust did not. "Does she know you're here?"

'Jack' rested a hand on the hilt of his weapon. "I think that's something to keep quiet. Were you looking for her?"

"No, just the way out."

The adventurer tilted his head a little to the side, skeptical. "You're sure you can leave here?"

"Yes. Why?" Of this one thing, Kay felt absolutely certain; it threw him off to have it questioned. If people were going to approach him and ask difficult questions, he wanted his cane back. Jack was still looking funny at him.

"No… reason. The exit is back the way you came, big door..." Jack began walking back that way, passing cleanly through doors and walls, not seeming to notice that he was striding down the wall. Perhaps he was doing it for dramatic effect. Kay trailed along, watching the floor. Eventually, the shoes stopped.

"Really, I don't see how you could've missed it," Jack said. He had stopped at a section of wall. Kay looked at it, then at the opposite side.

"No door." A thread of memory: _seek and you shall find_. Seeking, but not finding. And Jack was looking at him strangely again.

"Even I can find it." He tapped the wall as if tapping a seam. "Right here. I'd push it open but touching things and me don't get along. Shove. Right here."

Kay approached the wall and, feeling foolish, gave it a shove. A wave of cold – stepping into that blast of wind all over again – and he stumbled into the mirror room. The shock of it alone was enough to make him cringe: all those Kay's, dark-clad and sin-ridden. And reflected in the ceiling, a hundred elegant women in white, hair tinted blue with the whiteness. She stepped coolly past him and, without so much as a glance in his direction, traced the outline of the door with her finger. Ice grew around it until the door was indistinguishable from the wall. It flattened then, indistinguishable as from the other side, and Kay knew it was gone- permanently.

"Hello, Kay."


	7. Afterthoughts Chapter 7

"EVERYONE's dead."

"Yes," Burke said patiently, as he'd been saying for the past two hours, and reached out a hand out to help her. "They are dead."

Gerda ignored his outstretched hand and swung for the nearest branch herself. "Not just Jack. Jack senior, the dragon—"

"Since they were the same person, I hardly think they count separately."

"Anyone who ever knew either of them…" she steadied her footing and looked at the ground, thirty feet below. "Lumi's the only one left."

"Barring the goblins and Adversary," Kramer noted placidly. He was about six yards in front of them, perched on one of the vines, wings tight against his back. Vines, strong and thick as oak trees, surrounded them above and below as they made their way out of the city. This required climbing up, down, and, when they had gotten to the edge of the city, through a thirty foot wall of vines. Gobs hadn't settled the city but several regiments had set up camp outside it, waiting for the return of their overlords. They were brutal without the threat of sorcery or higher-ups to please and had brought in new sorcerers to command the birds and do their spying. It was impossible to fly over the thorn wall without attracting attention. The only choice had been to climb through, much the same way they had entered.

The whole adventure had been a colossal waste of time, good only for picking up supplies, which now swayed dangerously in the too-heavy pack strapped loosely to her back. Her break completed, she reached for the next branch and felt the pack rush forward to jostle her center of gravity.

She teetered and heard an instant "Gerda, don't move!"

She stopped in irritation, balancing between limbs, as Burke leapt to an adjacent vine. He relieved her of the pack and offered to manually lift her to the next branch. Directly after they'd entered the wall of thorns, the angels had decided she had the decision-making capability of a three year old.

"I've asked you to stop doing that," she said with frustration, retreating to her previous position before he could help her.

"You rush something that cannot be rushed," he replied bluntly. "If everyone is dead, there is no need to move as quickly as you wish."

"I want to be out of here." Three hours was quite long enough to be more than ten feet off the ground.

"It's only thirteen feet left, if you are patient," Kramer called back. He was close enough to the edge that he could let go of the vine and hover in the inches above it.

"All the more reason for caution," Burke instructed, and offered his hand.

"I'm pretty sure I can make it."

"'Pretty sure' will not keep you from falling."

"I'll chance it." And she moved forward, around his blockade, and readied for the jump to where Kramer stood.

"This is not the time or place to risk yourself." Burke moved into her path again.

"I can do it." The gap was looking greater now though. How much had Kramer been hovering before reaching the end? They had an internal safety net, she had… she hesitated.

Reluctantly, she reached out a hand and they sailed over the long gap. The flight made her realize the deceptive length of the jump – she never would have made it and dozens of thorn-ridden vines would have torn at her on the way down, if not outright impaled her. Burke set her down on the far branch and she kept moving, cat-like, towards the exit. She didn't object to letting them carry her down after that. The nearest gob camp was a mile to the west but they patrolled often and, with nothing else to do, patrolled far. They would eat anything they came across.

She turned to head towards the path north. The Snow Queen's castle within the town had been empty, as dead an end as Jack, but she remembered an alternative. The original castle to the far north. She hadn't expected the Snow Queen to be in the capital once she saw the state of it anyway. No one awake would stay in that overgrown back-lot, much less a genius witch-season.

"You don't want to rest first?" Burke asked.

"I'm fine. We've lost a lot of time here." Now that her feet were flat on the ground though, she was feeling the blisters that had been gestating the past few days. Boots hadn't exactly been standard equipment as a nanny and while these fit, they rubbed at new places. "Why don't you two scout ahead for gob patrols? I need a moment alone."

"You shouldn't be left—"

"For personal reasons," Gerda said firmly, and Burke stopped mid-sentence. All the lights came on.

"Of course. We'll scout."

It felt a bit silly to warn them away with gobs so close (okay, a lot silly), but it had been a long time since leaving the homelands and she hadn't had a moment alone since she joined up with them. Warning them off for 'personal reasons' was the only break possible. She headed for the tree line of the nearby woods, not bothering to conceal her hobble now, and collapsed on a boulder with more than a little drama. Too dangerous to take off the boots but not too dangerous to sit and admire the sun for the first time in days, unimpeded by a network of vines.

This proved to be a mistake, as the warmth of the boulder and the cool breeze made a façade of safety. If she closed her eyes, she could pretend she was sitting on a park bench, safe in New Jersey, and she'd just completed a hike down in Mountainside.

That brought about a whole new problem.


	8. Afterthoughts Chapter 8

/

_Kay lagged several yards behind, always the logical one when it came to hiking._

"_Hurry up!" Gerda called back, scaling the rock easily. Kay, for all his bragging and logic and math, was not the most physically adept and never showed interest in becoming so. As a result, his frame stayed small, stamina transient and subject to his whim. He was the one who had insisted she wear a giant ruff-hooded coat this morning. The worry was childish: if she hadn't known better, she would have said she was the older, rather than the same age of fourteen._

"_Don't rush me," Kay said firmly. "It's a cliff you want to go up and we don't know what's at the top."_

"_It's a hill with some snow. And there's more snow at the top. What do you think there's going to be, a… ha! You do!"_

_Kay focused on climbing. The way he avoided eye contact was more than enough of a betrayal. Gerda laughed. _

"_You think there's going to be goblins like in your dad's stories!"_

"_He's seen them."_

"_Not here!"_

"_In lands he's been to, near here, they're common as coin. And they can walk longer than you or me. Besides, I'd rather look out for a goblin than snow bees." _

"_Quiet, you!" She scrambled up towards the nearest plateau, intentionally sending showers of snow down over Kay. "I just hate bees!"_

"_Bzz, bzz, bzz," he mocked from below, despite the buckets of snow falling over her. "I'm a figment of Gerda's grandmother's imagination, what will the realm do—c'mon Gerda, cut it out—ow!"_

"_Kay?" She pivoted and nearly lost footing herself, trying to peer over her coat's thick ruff. "A rock? You okay?"_

_No answer. By the time she could see over her coat hood, he had slid to the end of the rope and was clutching the cliff directly, fingers digging into the rock. He didn't respond when she called his name again, pressing his face against his arms. Seconds later, he dropped the six or seven feet to the ground and lay there, pressing his hands to his face._

"_Kay!" She was descending as quickly as she safely could, cursing the idea of ever going climbing this late in the year. She dropped the last seven feet, as Kay had, and scrambled to his side. The boy was laughing and crying at once, pressing snow to his eyes._

"_You know, it feels exactly like I got stung by a bee in the eye," he laughed, even as he tried to curl up in a ball around the pain._

"_Are you all right?" she demanded, almost in tears herself. "You didn't hurt your back when you fell, did you?"_

"_I'll be fine. My back's fine."_

"_Stand up and let me see, you probably got something poked in your eye." She held out a hand as she'd seen her mother do in situations like these. Not much like these though. Mother would never have allowed something like this to happen._

_Kay stood and, with some hesitation, opened his eyes. He flinched, but made no further comment about the pain. She moved into his field of vision and, afterwards, could never forget the expressions that played across his face._

"_I see you doing things," he said as she examined his eye with a cool, calm air._

"_Yes, well, your vote of confidence for my future has been noted," she said, putting her hands on his shoulders to get some stability in the uneven snow-bank._

_Kay forced a laugh – she could tell because normal people didn't tense like that before they laughed. "No, not future things. Things like… you lied to your mother about us coming out here."_

"_Yes, I had to."_

"_And you stole a kitten from the autumn peddler who came through last month."_

_That one gave her pause and she looked at him, instead of into one watering eye. "What gave me away?"_

_For a moment, he seemed about to shrug off the question, but he was getting more frantic as the minutes wore on. "I see it happening. Like little… ghosts of you, hovering around your head."_

"_Did you hit your head?" A mother-type question._

"_No, I caught the rope, I didn't bang nearly at all – I can just _see_ things, clear like—they're all of you, doing different things."_

"_Like what?"_

_His head dipped into his chest, guilty. "Bad things. I don't want to talk about them."_

"_Then why'd you bring them up? You're being frustrating!" The thought of him seeing her doing a bunch of bad things made her chest hurt, throat dry. "I haven't done anything bad to you except asking you on this darn hiking trip. What kind of bad things?"_

_He retreated so quickly, it might have all been a trick. "Just, just little things, maybe they're not all bad. I'm sorry. I'm probably just confused. We can go back now, and I won't say anything."_

"_Are you going to tell people about the things?"_

"_No."_

_/_

_#_

Gerda blinked back to wakefulness, prodded by someone shaking her.

"This is a bad place to sleep. Are you all right?"

A young girl stood over her, face muddied but a fair complexion. She couldn't have been older than nine or ten and was wearing the remains of a nice blue dress over work pants, the dress hiked up to accommodate hobnailed boots. A satchel was slung over her shoulder, hanging a little lower than her waist, logically too big for her.

She was the strangest thing Gerda had seen all day, and she pushed herself up onto her elbows.

"What are you?"

"I am a who. My name is Irene." The girl curtsied sweetly, with an almost regal air.

"Aren't you… a bit young, to be out here alone, Irene?"

The girl's face grew stern. "I wasn't alone before. But Lootie has betrayed the cause and is gone forever and I am the only one left to help Curdie."

"Er," Gerda had the unsettling feeling that she was missing something (or everything) about the explanation. It didn't help that the twenty minute (maybe? Hopefully only twenty minutes had gone by) nap had left her groggy and repetitive. "Who?"

"My nursemaid, Lootie, betrayed Curdie and I to the goblins. She has been working with them all along, and when they had Curdie, they fell on her and ate her. I was hiding."

"They didn't eat… Curdie?"

"He has made enemies below ground and was taken there to face charges from the goblin king. He will be tortured for his opposition of them but, because he is a miner, he will be used to further the Adversary's causes. He is skilled."

"I'm… sorry."

"Why? He is not dead. And I am going to save him."

"…oh. Yeah, of course, I forgot. But how will you get past the goblins?"

"You have asked me many questions, can I ask you one before I answer?"

"…yes," Gerda said, with some hesitation. The strangeness of it all had made the cursed man and the ravens cross her mind. If it was an odd question, or suspicious…

But Irene merely said, "What are you doing out here? In the open and sleeping. It isn't wise."

"I… was seeking someone too." It beat telling her she was seeking the Snow Queen's castle, complete with giant, of-Fabletown-importance weapon she had to destroy.

"Who? Perhaps I have seen them."

"He doesn't live here, so it's hardly likely."

"Many don't. I don't, you don't. What does he look like?"

Okay, now she would have to substantiate the farce. "Um, he's got black hair, kind of a short man, I would think. And apparently he's blind."

"Was he born that way?"

"No. No. He went blind sometime after I lost contact with him. Also, he might be with the Snow Queen. They know each other."

The girl looked dubious. "I have not seen him, or she, but I've heard of her evil. The goblins made a cursed mirror for her, once. Curdie's father knew about it."

"Oh?"

"It broke."

"I'm sorry." She wasn't seeing the connection, but everything Irene said seemed to be extremely important to Irene.

"Again you are sorry!" Irene looked over her shoulder, not truly frustrated with this conversation but concerned about their exposed location. "Are you trying to get to the Snow Queen's world, then? To find your friend?"

"She's on a different world?" That would explain why none of this one had looked familiar to her.

"She is back at her home. The goblins were speaking of it when they took Curdie. At least that's what I believe, because they spoke of a magnificent lady guest of snow and cold who had left them and gone home only recently to her own world."

This news hit Gerda like a hoof between the eyes. Another world. It had been hard enough to gather a gateway to this one, Frau had made that much clear. Shouldn't they have some kind of locator beacon that could find the damn mirror, not send her all over the worlds? That castle had been empty as a tomb, beyond the still sleeping strangers-and to find it was all a waste of time anyway?

"Well, are you?" Irene asked again, returning the question.

"Sorry. What? Oh, going to the Snow Queen's world, yes. Yes. I need to get there."

"Good! I'm sure Grandmother will know the way, and if you help me, I can get you to her."

"Er, hold on, who's Grandmother?" Again, she was missing something of the conversation. It wasn't her imagination, Irene was piloting this conversational boat and fast.

"Grandmother can open world gates at will and I'm sure she will let you travel them. It is how I came to be here. Shall we move? We're in the open here."

"Oh, sure, sure." Gerda moved hurriedly behind the boulder, stepping into the fringes of the tree line. "My companions should be further down the road. Your grandmother is…?"

"She is back at home. I return to her as soon as I have Curdie and will tell her of Lootie's betrayal. I think we will be leaving this world and we can ask her then."

"And Grandmother's not in danger, where she is now?"

"The goblins are as blind to her as your friend. Come, we should hurry." This said, Irene picked up her pace, forcing Gerda to jog after her. They went about a mile without spotting Kramer and Burke; this concerned Gerda but she wasn't about to let Irene see her panic.

"So, tell me more about Curdie," she said.

"He is a miner."

"A miner needs your help? I thought he was… younger."

"He is merely a year older than me, and I am the only one who can help him because I know the goblins' weaknesses." The girl patted her satchel gently. "Curdie and I have driven them away many times."

"Yeah? What are they afraid of, then?"

"Verse. And eggs. Their feet are tender as well."

That explained the hobnailed boots. Eggs probably filled the satchel.

"Do you know any verse?" Irene asked pleasantly.

"What, poetry?"

"Or songs. The fiercer the better."

"Um, well…" She had learned quite a few in the Mundy world, though their potency was questionable. What made a song 'fierce'? Death metal, or would some alternative rock do the trick? "I can probably pull something together."

"Good. I will venture down into the mines, where the goblins have made their tunnels, and find Curdie. I do not know how long I will be running up and out with Curdie, or where they have stored him. A pair of new lungs to sing the goblins away when we get back would be a gift worthy of a debt, as I have proposed."

"How will you even find your way out?" Gerda exclaimed. Irene lifted a finger, hovering it horizontally as if suspended.

"A thread will lead me home. It always has, connecting me with Grandmother. I swear, this mission shall not take longer than tonight, and then I will lead you to Grandmother."

Gerda had been passing her hand over and around the girl's finger, trying to find the phantom thread. She looked up now.

"And if you don't come back?"

"You can move on. I swear you to no agreement, I have asked you no name, and you owe me nothing. Yet if you agree now, I will expect to find you here and, if you dissolve our agreement after I have left, you may kill both Curdie and I. I must trust you so please, tell me true."

After a moment of hesitation, Gerda nodded. "I'll stay."

They walked another mile or two in silence before Irene paused, said "this is the place," made sure that Gerda had a safe location to stay, and vanished into what looked like nothing more than a cave.


	9. Afterthoughts Chapter 9

Lumi turned with exaggerated slowness, smiling.

"I haven't had time enough for you lately, but I see you have met my son." In her voice, the room echoed; icy arches and walls seeming to bend to her imperial tone.

"He's dead," Kay managed, staring at the floor fervently. He had tried to redirect his attention as soon as possible but a half-glance had been enough to stagger him. He needed to stop getting blindsided by villains.

She didn't react to his statement so, to affirm that she had heard him, he asked: "You knew that already?"

"Of course." She left the former door and stepped elegantly to the collection of displaced shards on the floor. "You have been here two weeks and this is all the progress you've made? Too much time spent escaping."

"I have no reason to help you."

"We have a contract."

"Under duress, I think that invalidates most of them," he said, pushing on his glasses with clumsy fingers. The gesture was not a clean one, but she did him the decency of allowing it.

"You are lucky I respect our agreement still. I could have taken you years ago, yet I let you live out your life in the Mundy after breaking your word to me. And now, the contract is the only reason you are here."

"And you're to be commended for that." Saying those words to someone whose past looked like hers took a concerted effort. "But if I'm dead, you've nothing to hold over me, so I think you've waited a little too long to claim the contract. And to be frank, threatening to kill me again can be nothing compared to that… thing's… efforts."

"Which is why I won't threaten to kill you again," Lumi said with what Kay felt was unusual patience. "You are dead. I offer the rest of death, when you finish this and with it, our contract."

It would have been easy to be sulky and bitter and entirely silent at this, but words – the last gasping breath of life – wanted to be spoken. And he wanted to feel alive, while there was something here to fight against. Unless he misunderstood, she was offering the death part of death – stop breathing, seeing, and feeling – in exchange for finishing this ice puzzle.

"So what's this thing I'm to finish then?"

"You don't want to further discuss the prize?"

"It's not very interesting. And I've already got one, for the moment."

"And you do not wonder why you haven't returned to the Mundy yet? You're no longer a Fable, Kay. This is what happens to weak Fables. No one notices an absence, they leave no gap when they die, and they do not come back. Like the Mundy humans you have run to, you _die_."

"And if I'm a Mundy, this is… hell?"

"A diversion of my own creation. If you are killed here, you will die Mundy and go wherever Mundy humans would go."

There was such simplicity in this statement, made as if he should understand what dying Mundy meant. Half of him did. It fed the temptation to look full on her wearing an incredulous expression, which gnawed at his stomach. It was hard to hate her fully when she was a regal and detached voice, converging around him from each wall.

"And I will kill you, if you finish this for me," Lumi finished easily.

"Again, what is it I'm building."

Lead entered her voice and she stalked closer to him. "What does it matter?"

He looked off to the side, pulling off his glasses in a smooth gesture. "Because I'm no good to you insane. Or blind. I'm dangerously close to one and all I have to do is look on you to achieve both at once. I've seen the Adversary, I know my limits, so tell me what I'm doing."

Her laugh was like a rush of bells inexpertly played, coming to a sudden and unexpected stop. "You pit your sanity against my information?"

"You need it done on a hell of a deadline, and I want to know why."

"It is nothing you'd approve of," she said coyly and stepped closer. She was taller than he was and the whole dynamic was based on a campaign of intimidation. When she advanced, he retreated, and hit the far wall.

"I could solicit another," she continued. "I use you because we have a contract and you have the knowledge to complete it."

"Tell me what it does. I will look on you. I've nothing to lose that's not already gone." The flat deadness of his voice concealed the terror nicely. There was a limit to what he could bear seeing before steps had to be taken, but there was also a limit to the mind. Post-Adversary, Kay hated to admit that his mental state was about as stable as a snowflake. But Lumi had bought the gamble.

"It kills. Is that a fair enough answer?"

"No." And he started to look up at her. She slapped her hand over his eyes; his head slammed back against the wall, and she hissed, though not entirely displeased. More of a parent disapproving of a child than a villain delivering the death she'd promised.

"Incorrigible. But, since you play this game so aptly, it is the goblin mirror that has so affected your life. When it is complete, it will be a gate to any world I choose, permitting the instant transfer of anything or anyone with no mucking about in dragons' stomachs or dark middle-worlds. I can infect the entirety of your Mundy world from here. And I will."

He knew he remembered the mirror, the cuts on his fingers, the confidence when he began placing the pieces, with logic and clarity. It was familiarity, not skill. He had done this before.

"Naturally, I have cast such spells on the room that you will not be able to leave through the mirror, even if you possessed the necessary magics. As you have noticed, I am on a timeline and have not the time to come track you down again. However, my patience is significantly longer than yours and it would be better for both if you agreed now. You swore as a child that you would complete this mirror."

"I thought you would kill me if I didn't!" He wanted to feel the back of his head to see if there was blood but her hand remained over his eyes.

"And now I will keep you alive if you don't, such a life as this is. You'll tire of it sooner than I will tire of waiting. Anyway," and her hand over his eyes relaxed. "It's not as if anyone you know is there to be saved. The empire will rise again and the Mundy world will be conquered."

"There's still Fabletown."

"Dark killed them. Did you think something thriving on fear could be taken down by such fearful creatures as Fables? The others are dead, the only thing keeping you from joining them is our contract." The hand was removed altogether and Kay dropped his gaze quickly. Dead. All dead. Fortunate that there had never been anyone really important then, besides Bigby.

… and Snow.

… and Totenkinder, who had at least talked to him; and Beast; the members of the managerial network that ventured out of Bullfinch Street to speak to him. None of the Fables had really liked him but most had tolerated him on account of his ability– perhaps Mowgli had made it out. Kay had met him on his flight out of the Homelands, the other man's upbringing with animals setting off no alarm bells in Kay's visions, and it was hard to think of him dead, now. Time with Mowgli had always been peaceful, almost normal. Fate made up for that by giving the man a traveler's soul.

Kay didn't realize he had ended up sitting on the floor until Lumi spoke again. He almost looked up.

"I only take the Mundy out of the hands of Dark," she said without pity. "Everyone you cared about is already dead."

Nothing. Say nothing.

"You will not escape again. And you will not find death within this room."

"Maybe death will come to me," he said with false brightness. He still held the trump: blindness and insanity. All right, it wasn't much of a trump.

She spoke quietly, giving him just enough time to remember that the puzzle was all that stood between him and death.

"It will not. I can make your time here worse without inflicting blindness or insanity or death. You will fulfill this contract. If your will doesn't bend to mine, I can make it."

Another pause, giving him the obligatory opportunity to interject something heroic or noble or stalwart. Instead he brushed the snow out of his hair and absently fingered a shard with the other hand, sitting more or less motionless until the season took the hint and left. The temperature went up by what seemed like ten degrees.

On the wall, one of the mirrors winked out. Fifteen minutes later, another. Sometimes he would have a crisis of confidence and try to pry up the shards, succeeding only in cutting at his hands. Eventually the mirrors would start disappearing again.


	10. Afterthoughts Chapter 10

Gerda built a fire not long after Irene left, singing loudly all the while. The angels didn't reappear and she assumed (correctly, in fact) that they were scouting the area. Night was cold here and winter breathed in the air like a ghost growing in power. She wasn't sure how far she could have wandered into the nameless 'north' before finding out the Snow Queen had her own world. Miles. Too far by half.

A twig snapped in the undergrowth and she realized she had stopped singing, distracted by massaging her aching feet. She started in again with a vengeance on an old song of her youth—

"Schnipp-schnapp –schnurre-basselurre!"

It sounded fierce – but needed more lyrics.

"All flee or face my fury!"

Oh great, now it was a couplet. Couldn't leave it at that.

"Smash them, stomp them, into curry,

Thrown to Fabletown in a hurry,

Thrash them, trash them, noises burry,

Goblins flee or taste my fury!"

And she grabbed one of the sticks out of the fire and brandished it threateningly – in case they noticed she'd used fury twice in only six lines. The noises stopped, uncertainly. She recycled songs for about an hour after that, weaving in the 'schnipp-schnappe' whenever she could, and by the time Irene and Curdie returned three hours later, she was ready for whatever suggestions of rhyme Curdie could provide. The miner boy had bruises up and down his arms and a nasty cut above his eye, but he acted as a fount of rhyme, hardly short of breath.

"Don't worry," Irene assured her. "It's almost morning and these goblins will not pursue us during the day."

"Brilliant." Gerda tossed another 'schnippe-schnappe-schnurre!' at the bushes. "Are you going to be all right, Curdie?"

"Sure." The miner boy – maybe ten? – was eating some of the scrambled eggs (apparently the scent made goblins stay away too) Gerda had cooked. He nodded at her question, munched some more, and made a joke about the way goblins smelled. His hands were steady and if she hadn't been working with children for the past couple of years, she might have been stunned at his composure. He was quiet, when he wasn't joking, and she could tell from Irene's body language that this wasn't normal behavior for him. Irene tried to rouse him a little, asking about the Snow Queen on Gerda's behalf, and partially succeeded.

"She left, and the king was angry about it. She was supposed to be the new queen, since they couldn't get Irene, and partner with the goblin king, and terrorize the Mundy world. The king's idea. She'd agreed to it and then bowed out."

"And she left for… home?" Gerda asked.

"She said so. There was a weapon there, something she had to prepare."

"A weapon in her castle?"

"She wasn't doling out addresses, sorry. The goblins did think something was going on between her and a Mundy, though, if that helps you at all."

"A Mundy?"

It couldn't be Kay then, could it. Mundys were easy to corrupt and sway once you got them to believe in Fables at all. Whoever it was would be fully under Lumi's spellery.

"Thank you, Curdie," she told the little miner. "Stopping the weapon is my business and this has helped."

"As you helped Irene and I," Curdie replied and that was the end of his useful explanation. Both of the children insisted on going two more miles from the mine while it was still dark, despite the distance and excellent camouflage that Irene had set up at their camp. The sun came up and the children went to sleep, Gerda staying awake to watch for goblins. After an hour of struggling to retain consciousness, she wandered a bit from the camp, out towards the road. She planned to indulge in a suspicion.

"Burke? Kramer?"

The air quivered a bit and Burke walked out of the trees.

"You rang?"

"How long have you been around?"

"Off and on. You seemed to prefer travelling alone, and Irene was a safe enough child, so…"

"And her grandmother?"

"Ah, see, there we can help. Though we could not get you to this world, we can easily transport you back to your own. You and the Snow Queen originated from the same world, so there is no reason for you to accompany Irene further off your quest. It would not be dangerous, but it would be a delay."

"Why not just do this originally? I've been tramping around-!"

"We honestly thought she would be in the capital. It is her latest estate, it is where she slept, but we should have thought of…"

There was something in the way his voice trailed off. "Of?"

"It is where things must conclude. It's the way of stories to end in your own world and, to be honest, we are certain now that Lumi and Kay are both there. You must join them." He began detaching the sheath from his belt. "I'm coming with you but if anything goes wrong, you'll need to have this."

"Hang on, no, I don't even know how to use a sword. And the kids should probably have an escort home. It's not safe for—"

"They are more than capable, and Kramer will be staying with them."

"But they won't know…"

"Kramer will explain things and they will trust him. Burke and I have been long acquaintances of Irene's grandmother. We can go now, if you're ready."

"Okay, just a minute." She fumbled to attach the sheath to her jeans buckle, a process that wasn't working well. The sword was weighty and gave off an odd warmth. The attaching-to-belt process made no sense. "Burke, how do you—"

And the whole world turned to ice.


	11. Afterthoughts Chapter 11

_It hadn't ended there, with the fall and how he started to talk about seeing things. Kay saw everything everyone in town had ever done wrong and the knowledge drove him to something close to hermitage. He took to hiding in his room or closing his eyes when people were around. She bothered him most and the last time they met, before the Snow Queen, he had told her every thing he could see about her. _

_He hadn't meant it judgmentally, something closer to 'please, please, just stay away from me,' but the visual onslaught of misdeeds and selfishness had barbed his tact. Sitting on the floor, his eyes on the window always, he told her every thing that was ever wrong with her, said he never wanted to see her again, and would she please go now?_

_By the time of that conversation, they had found four rapists, eight murderers, and sixteen adulterers before Kay insisted that he had to stop using his 'gift,' as they were calling it. The law enforcement, always understaffed in their little town and more so with the Adversary's forces coming, drafted a contract to draft him, as a cursed witness to every crime._

_The night they drafted it, he had hitched his sled to the Snow Queen's recruiter's and flown out of the town. She'd tried to go after him, headed as far north as she could until she ran out of villages and then… nothing. Nothing but the witch's intimidating castle and Gerda hadn't been able to get near it. _

_And she hadn't wanted to. Even knowing that he was defending himself, even knowing that what he saw was real, something broke in her and it was hard not to blame him for that. _

_And beyond that, to blame Fables for being what they were._

_She had been living "fringe" ever since._

#

She was certain Burke had meant to accompany her but that wasn't what had happened. Searing snow tore at her coat and if she had thought the capital was bad, the Snow Queen's world was far worse. Still, it smelled familiar, as the capital world and the Mundy never had, and she knew within seconds that she had grown up here.

Sticking her hands in her armpits to keep warm, she trudged forward, heading what her senses told her was north. Burke would catch up or find his way after her, the way the pair usually did.

The "path" had vanished and she followed first the direction she had arrived in then, when that led into a snow-bedecked forest, along the trail of some caribou. Her thoughts drifted – she was hungry, she was tired, she was always cold – and Kay made his way in and out of them, because he had been the subject of the recent lie and this is what she felt she had always abandoned him to.

She moved inexorably forward, first blaming it on hope then, when hope abandoned ship, on dedication, and before four hours had passed in the frozen wilderness, it was a mix of punishment and continuation of a quest long forgotten. Come hell or low temperatures, she would complete one of her quests, this time.

Snow dunes. That's what she was going up and down. At some point, she might have crossed a lake, watching the moon go through a lazy cool cycle over the sky. It made her change her course midway, since it spoke both hope and doom: she was going the right way now but still finding nothing. Maybe the Snow Queen had moved her headquarters in a great gust of wind.

Maybe the weapon was portable.

Hell, Gerda had heard of a magician in Mundy stories that had a moving castle and everyone knew of Baba Yaga's … whatever it was. A mobile weapon wasn't outside the realm of possibility here.

She stopped at the side of a frozen riverbank (it was the next in the 'north' path she was following) and stared across. Behind her came the sound of hoofbeats, somewhere far behind and growing nearer in a great herd. If the river could hold them, it would hold her, but she couldn't take any chances, as the only representative of a community that wanted the Snow Queen's weapon gone.

"Get moving, human!" someone yelled, the voice fleshy and thick.

She half-turned at the form of address and saw the herd advancing on her, not diverting their course. The caribou generated a snowstorm of white powder and galloping blackness, coming towards her, advancing at a breakneck pace. The sheer bigness of the herd frightened her and she darted forward, terrified, then to the side and out of their path.

"Thank you," the speaker shouted over the noise, for all the world like a taxi driver in New York, as they charged all at once over that fragile lake. So much weight, gracefully borne; it made no impression on the snowfall. Once on the far side, they slowed, some even going so far as to kneel in groups of two or three. Only one stalked back to her on long, knobby legs.

"You have been here before, human?"

"No, I've just the sense to get out of the way."

"But not to stay out altogether. You are headed north, you know that."

"I am, and that's the way I want to go."

The caribou stared at her through dark lashed eyes, nostrils flexing with former exertion. "You know where you are."

"At the edge of a river, which I'm following north. I'm heading to the Snow Queen's castle."

"It does not lie near the river. Humans rarely find it when they want to and often when they don't, unless she is waiting for you."

"That's a no."

"Then you will wander ceaselessly and we will eventually run you down."

"I guess so. Great chatting with you, I'll be sure to climb a tree if I see—"

The caribou drew its head back and flicked its ears several times, giving her a dour look. It took Gerda a minute to realize this was offence ala caribou.

"Honestly, what you do not think of could fill a goblin's mansion. You want to upset the young ones of the herd? Make us hang our heads when we encounter other, less stupid, humans? We don't want to run anyone down. I will take you to her, if you can offer us something in exchange."

As she had nothing but the clothes on her back and the satchel Bigby had supplied, this didn't seem to improve the situation. The caribou shook its head when she proffered the contents.

"Material things. Something else?"

"I'm going to destroy a weapon in the Snow Queen's castle."

The caribou blinked at her: this, then, was an incredulous expression. "A weapon?"

"Of unimaginable power. I was sent all the way from the Mundy world, where the Fables escaped."

"Lumi has dictated unkind weather since she came back to the castle. Driving sleet and hail at times, thick blankets of snow, and you may have noticed we number only thirty. Our herd runs at ninety, most years. If this weapon will impact that—"

"Has to, I mean, anything that Lumi's using will be connected to weather. Probably."

"Then mount."

"You don't need to explain things to…?" Gerda asked as she circled the caribou, wondering how to mount until the caribou knelt.

"They are dumb," it replied simply. "I lead and they will stay here until I return. It will be many miles, since you are off the path and must ride."

"I'll walk—"

"And delay us further." The caribou gathered its energy, assuring itself that she was solidly on its back, and leapt forward. It was the last they spoke for several hours.

#

Maybe it was that the cursed man had been so easily tricked into surrendering his freedom; maybe it was that the caribou was being gracious; but the whole debt being incurred put Gerda on edge.

The temperature slipped downwards, like a child on skates, falling at times then staggering upwards and falling again. Gerda took to flexing her fingers, wiggling her toes, and being keenly aware that she might lose her nose to the cold and that there was little she could do about it. The sword wasn't warm enough to do anything but act like a weak hot-water bottle resting against her leg.

She said nothing of the cold to the caribou until the morning she couldn't get up. It was too cold. She slept until she felt the caribou nudging her up like a new foal and she climbed sleepily onto its back. That was the second day and she spent most of it, her fourth day in this weather, in a rush of wind and powder. This continued until the afternoon when the caribou sank to its knees outside an abandoned town.

Gerda slid off the sweat-soaked back and squinted at civilization.

"The Adversary's work?"

"Made it a ghost town. Lumi's castle is only two miles from here, hours by foot and less if you hurry."

"No hurry." She wiggled her fingers inside their gloves again and stood, less wobbly than her companion. "I'll find some firewood and we can take over one of the houses."

"I should get back."

"You're no more fit to travel then I am. Find a house or we'll both freeze out here. I'll check for the house with the caribou in it when I get back."

"Bae," it said as it trudged towards the town. "My name is Bae."

"Gerda."

At this point, getting cursed didn't seem any more likely than it had with Irene. A suspicious pile of firewood sat a little ways inside the tree line and Gerda stood, looking at it a moment. Fine. If the angels wanted to be passive about it, she was currently accept currency in firewood, matches, kerosene, or battery-powered space heaters. The house in the town soon sang with warmth and she did her finger exercises, warming motions, and buried herself beneath (equally suspicious) blankets she found upstairs. The caribou knelt by the fire, placid and looking like the shaggiest dog ever born.

She curled next to him and they survived several days that way, him eating tree moss and her the remainder of the food in her pack. On several occasions during those days, Bae would leave the town, giving no explanation of where or why. She occupied herself with stocking the fire and attempting to call the angels until the caribou returned, usually with reports on goblin or ice trolls' patrols in the area. They were safe and hidden here, carving out a little cave of sanctuary in a town long abandoned.

Like all good things, it didn't last. When they were both recovered, Bae said, "Lumi's castle is over this town like a shadow in the morning. Follow the shadow and you will arrive at the gate."

She hadn't wanted to go originally; she wanted to go even less now, and burrowed her face into the shaggy, pungent mane. She might have whimpered something to that effect, about things not being fair and it was cold.

Bae continued: "There is no earthly way to open the gates, but by Lumi's word. Find a way." The caribou stood, taking most of the warmth with him. "I hope you succeed in your quest."

"You'll know if I do," Gerda said quickly, lest he think he had to come back and get her. "I will find her-it, rather- and return to my own world. Thank you."

"One less human to run over." Bae dipped his head to leave the house and galloped out into the cold, leaving her alone.

And she finally began to give thought to how she would enter a magical castle, locate a magical weapon, destroy it, and return home.


	12. Afterthoughts Chapter 12

The floor was getting bothersome. In an increasing number of places, Kay could see himself reflected – countless fractious, broken Kay's—and it took first self-control, then apathy of the bitterest kind to keep from smashing himself to pieces again.

A month had crept by (or so he hypothesized).The cold had put a creeping, relentless stop to activities that went beyond the mirror's progress. There wasn't much he could have done with the door anyway and he knew it.

Speech stepped into the background more and more each day, until the room stood pristine and dead around him. It was like being in the middle of a swimming pool with all around him calm, not a ripple in sight. That feeling, that solitude, was getting to be more of a comfort than 'looking alive.' Breathing and the beat of his heart set Kay apart from the room, something moving within the solitude, but he was fairly sure these items wouldn't be around much longer, once the puzzle was completed.

Once he had 'agreed' to Lumi's proposition, he honestly didn't expect to see the season again until the puzzle was done. She wasn't the type to micromanage with so many projects weighing on her mind and the single-handed resurrection of an empire.

It came as a surprise to find her there when he woke one morning. She was kneeling on the great floor, fingering a single shard and looking sternly at the floor.

She knew he was there, kept her back to him, and took pleasure in not noting him as he stared at the far wall. He could go back to bed, theoretically but it was just a gesture. Playing at tiredness. He stood there, hands in his fraying pockets, eyes closed, until she chose to speak.

"You must work faster," she said.

Kay inclined his head slightly. That was doable – he hadn't been pressing himself. It was hard to rush towards his own death, however much he told himself he wanted it.

"One of my spies has told me someone is on their way. She will not stop this, if you complete it first."

He got excited before reality could hook his imagination. It could be Cinderella – a Fable spy somehow knowing that he was here, in pursuit… having escaped the ministrations of the soul-sucking vampire wandering around Bullfinch Street. No, he reminded himself, everyone was dead. Despair shuffled back into place.

Lumi was continuing. "How much longer, at speed? …Kay. Kay."

The voice called him back. "Days."

Lumi made an affirmative sound. "The cold will not slow you?"

That required even more thought. If he still felt the cold, it might trouble him; as it was, she should be more concerned about his mind drifting, losing sight of a lifetime that had ended but ceased to function, but this wasn't something she could or would guard him against. He shrugged.

"Good. I will be back in two days to start the proceedings. Be ready."

"Wait."

Now that his mind was here -

She waited, air thick with her impatience and anxiousness to be gone. He almost lost his question wondering if he made her uncomfortable. When she sighed, he decided he that did. She probably didn't have to deal with dead people much, at least, not ones that wouldn't leave.

"Who is coming?"

"She will die before she ever gets here," Lumi said dismissively. "Nothing changes."

That was fair enough. She left without fanfare and Kay knelt, taking up the shard she had left behind. It had no temperature, tripping only slightly over the frozen cuts on his fingers. The escape attempts that created them seemed to have taken place an eternity ago. He turned it over and over, thinking slowly. It was a relief to know things would continue, that this female interloper wouldn't come between him and death.

There were still some two hundred shards to go, scattered and oddly shaped, and he would be working faster now. He swallowed what little despair remained of the thwarted hope and began searching for the shard's hiding place in the jumble of pieces.


	13. Afterthoughts Chapter 13

It took a week of deep thought but Gerda strode up to the castle gate with a strategy in hand that, if it worked, would flabbergast the guards just enough to get her inside. If it didn't work, she had Kramer and Burke in hand.

Well, not in hand, really. More in a bush, somewhere. Probably waiting until she really needed them. That was what quests were all about, she had been telling herself for the past few days, self-development, and the angels were just making sure she got some in before entering the castle. She had been something of a jerk to them and one wasn't to know how angels reacted to jerks. The suspicious provisions had continued, so she knew they were there, at least.

The ice giants patrolling the area outside the castle moved more like sluggish, deep sea fish than third cousins to goblins. They followed her at such distance that they might lose her, if not for her footprints in the snow and human scent. She wasn't a threat. They let her walk right up and rap authoritatively at the ice-covered doors, never noticing the sword hidden on the inside of her pant leg. Maybe they just thought she had been injured in the war.

To her surprise, the door cracked open, sending a shower of stalactites plummeting towards her. A sour-faced sprite stuck his head out when these missiles failed to impale her.

"No soliciting."

"I have an appointment," Gerda said with that same tone of cold confidence. The sprite looked her up and down with narrowed eyes. The creature had no pupils, just the opaque glaze of a dead fish, a thing not fully formed.

"Nature of the appointment?"

"I'm from the village. This castle is on village land and seeing as the Queen has been shirking in her magisterial duties and come mid-April, which is where we are now, there's still no filing—"

"TAXES?" it hissed in disbelief.

"Well, she's certainly not providing any services to us, so we only thought it was—"

Now was a good time to be a Bigby-type. The sprite was looking her up and down suspiciously, waiting against its better judgment to see the hordes of militants spring from the snow and take them down. No such thing happened.

She was on the verge of calling for Kramer and Burke when someone spoke from inside.

"The lady wishes her in."

"Of course." The sprite stepped cleanly aside and let her in. Still, it jerked his head towards the giants, who lumbered towards the gate, hemming her in. She fought claustrophobia for a moment and stepped inside, keeping her back as straight as possible.

"Thank you."

The sprite shut the door and stepped away without replying. It passed into another corridor without inviting her to follow. The hall was empty with no trace of whoever had spoken. It was dark and secluded –lit only from the panels of sky-facing windows above, the initial gate led to a small bubbled antechamber with no furniture, and then a long arched hallway with dozens of doors, stretching on so long it tripped up perspective. There were, thank heaven, no mirrors.

"Hello?" she called, wandering a little further down the corridor's length. "Lumi? Madam Snow Queen?"

There was no end to the rooms ahead of her, all arched doorways each with a deathtrap of hanging icicles. Even if she reached the end, this was ignoring the regular staircases, every four-block of doors or so, that led up to some phantom other level. Lumi could be anywhere, the weapon could be anywhere, and she didn't even have a map.

"There's a girl now?" someone said, further down the hall and coming nearer. She quickened her pace, though she had seen no one yet.

"Yes, yes there is. Can you help me?"

"That all depends." The voice was directly in front of her now and seemed to be waiting for something. After a pause: "Well, what I can do is limited. What do you need?"

"You're… invisible?"

"I'm a lot of things, mostly an adventurer. At the moment, I'm –"

"You're Jack!"

"Got it in one."

"But you're… dead."

"Everyone gets hung up on that. Can I help you, visibility aside?"

"I need to destroy the weapon she's building. And, if you're dead, you'll hardly be able to defend me if I run into trouble, so I'd like to find it fast."

"…"

"You still there?"

"You hurt my pride, milady," he said, smarmily polite. "I do not know where she keeps such a weapon, she's made it a point not to tell me anything about it."

She started moving further down the hall. She wished now that she had a torch in her pack. It being dark had never occurred to her, this dark and being in an unfamiliar place made the Mundy in her think wistfully of a flashlight.

"I do know that she's been expecting you and that—"

"Jack," a voice from one of the stairways called. "Send her up."

Gerda looked around, wondering if the hero had left. His sentence cut off so sharply.

"Jack? You still there?" she asked. Wind pressed at her side, odd and weak, trying to urge her towards a doorway. "Is that you? What are you—"

"Fire and brimstone, women and questions- get inside, would you?" the ghost whispered, trying vainly to shove her against a solid wall. "She's had you tracked for the past several days and she will kill you when she finds you."

"Why didn't you say so sooner?! And it's a solid wall!" she said, feeling at the ice wall desperately. "There's nothing here!"

"There's a door, let me—damn!" The wind had tried to pluck the sword out of its sheath and failed. "Get it out and pry the door open. Hurry."

She did and followed his instructions to angle the weapon against her shoulder, balance her body weight against the weight of the sword, and jam it into the wall at a precise degree before running it around the perimeter of the 'door' only he could see. This took a full minute all told, her hands quickly becoming sweat-slick with the effort. The only thing she could compare it to was painting in miniature with a giant crayon and she had to just hope it worked.

It didn't. By now Jack was getting agitated about her stupidity, then apologizing for calling her stupid, then calling her actions stupid again. All around them, nothing happened; no one came to fetch her, and she had the funny idea there was no Snow Queen here at all. They were just two helpless people trapped in a hallway and one of them was already dead.

"Idiot!" Jack snapped abruptly.

"I am trying!" she hissed and the wind batted at her.

"No, no, no, me! Picture what you want on the other side of the door and go through."

"I… want… ?"

"A room, a thing, just do it and push!"

She shoved at the door and told herself to expect a room. A room with the weapon in it. "Concentrate!" Thanks, Jack, needed that, the room with the weapon, room with the weapon, room—

She fell forward onto her hands. The sound of the sword falling to the floor was lost in the hideous clamor of breaking glass.


	14. Afterthoughts Chapter 14

If it wasn't the greatest din in the history of dins, it was certainly the loudest to ever assault Lumi's castle, and yet Kay didn't look up. The wave of crashing-shattering-exploding mirrors advanced, making it difficult to tell what were the shards on the floor and what were parts from the mirrors on the wall. Irritation built up as he panned through the pieces, though he didn't dare look up and see the murderous intruder.

She was interfering.

Lumi had promised this wouldn't happen.

Finally he put on the glasses and decided to wait until the intruder had lost interest in this uninteresting room.

For her part, Gerda advanced with one hand up to shield her eyes against the falling and shattering mirrors. She kept almost telling Kay to do the same; he was just sitting there in the fallout, head tilted down, though the floor was quaking and rattling violently with her approach. She paused several feet from him and the mirrors slowed their breaking, though she could hear them continue to plink and bounce for a while after. Most of the mirrors in the room had broken, a small pile of shards half-burying the sword where it had skittered towards the wall.

"Have you been here long?" she asked Kay. Her voice sent a little jolt through him but his gaze never wavered from the floor, the black glasses an impregnable barrier against her. His fingers traced faint patterns over the ice, minding them.

"Go away," he said very quietly. "I'll be done soon."

She crouch next to him. He didn't respond. On a whim, she reached out and removed the glasses. The effect was like pulling the shade from a birdcage; Kay blinked in slow confusion and surprise.

Gerda gestured with the glasses. "Why would you pretend to be blind? Good grief, Kay, everyone thinks you're dead!"

He stared at her, shell-shocked, with two eyes that functioned perfectly as hers did and murmured something about seeing only one of her. The words were right; he wanted to get excited about seeing none of her sins, but the tone was lead. He said something faintly, returning his gaze to the floor, that it probably wasn't real, then. She almost reached out and clutched his hand before she remembered her mission. The mission was supposed to come before Kay.

"Kay, I came to find the weapon. I have to find it and destroy it before we can leave."

He leaned towards the floor, reaching for one of the shards like a man compelled. No one had washed the dried blood off his much-cut fingers. Gerda felt need and duty pull her in different directions, let him proceed, and heard an odd sound begin.

The mirrors on the walls tinkled and collected themselves back up into their frames, neat and perfect. As the mirrors reformed, so did the images they portrayed. One, a woman with straggly hair in need of cutting, wrapped in a too-thin coat with her hands shoved in her pockets. She rose and braced her weight on her retreating foot, looking down in anguish at her crouching companion. The other-

A man climbing headfirst into an abyss, working towards darkness with a passion that rivaled love. It wasn't metaphor: the vision of Kay in the mirrors was one of a man whose very clothes were drenched in things he had failed in, mocked by his sins, a man who would end it all if he could find a way. It wasn't a mockery of the Kay she knew. Not even that, it was a lie, something invented and fed into and fed by hatred.

The woman could not sink to her knees, because that was too passive: she tackled him away from his fixation with the floor. She rightfully didn't think he would pay attention to her any other way.

Once this action had been taken, she traded precious seconds fighting for words that weren't placating, sentimental - words that would make it through this blockade of lonely years.

"No," she said firmly. "I love you."

Startled out of his stupor and lying half-trapped beneath her from the tackle, Kay stared at her. He kept blinking hard, trying to see her.

"I still love you. If you don't pull yourself out of, out of that – pit, I'll keep saying it and I'll keep you here until you're all right again." She found that her feelings were thawing, she was dangerously close to tears.

He spoke as if trying out words. "You came?"

"I came. And we have to find the weapon, destroy it, and leave – you're cold, get off the floor—"

"I forget, is it Gerta or Gerda?"

"Are you making a joke? It's Gerda, Gerda - Kay, we have to go-"

"We can't. At least I can't." His breathing was stymied: he was trying not to laugh. "I'm dead."

"And she is going to be," Lumi said, having just come in. She now stood in the center of the room, evaluating the shards. "I'm sorry she disturbed your work to such an extent. I've repaired most of the damage. The puzzle is untouched."

Kay, who had been cold before, stiffened—the glasses went on. Gerda drew herself up, pulling him along with her.

"I came for the weapon," she said. "It's the second thing I intend to take."

"And the first is a dead man who doesn't want to go. You entered your own story a little late, don't you think? And without your angels too… did you think I would let them enter this world that easily? You've been on your own since you got here, barring Bae, who guided you close enough to me to ensure that you could not go gallivanting off on your own."

"You've never even met me!"

"The moment you gave your name to Bae, I learned everything he learned about you. Kay, do continue working on the puzzle."

He made to do so and Gerda hauled him up impatiently. "You can't."

"There is a contract. It is the only reason he has not gone to that corpse-nest Kingdom you call Haven."

"No…" It couldn't be right; there had to be some other reason. "It can't just be that you made a contract…"

"It is. It's our whole fable, Gerda," Kay murmured, staring at the floor. "There's nothing beyond the contract—"

"But we win!" she said fiercely, because she had told this story to the children a dozen times and it lived, a taunting and independent entity, in the back of her mind. She turned on Lumi. "We win, in the Mundy, and that means there has to be some way to win here!"

"Girl," Lumi said pleasantly. "You are two highly-forgettable Fables. No one noticed but you when Kay died, and he had even forgotten your name. You are powerless in the Mundy and have no magical presence here. I have power both here and there, if I ever chose to go. You die."

"But-" Gerda sought an answer with increasing desperation. "But we're both tied to the strongest Fable in the Homelands. Without us, without our story, you don't have power."

Lumi's face went quite white with anger.

"And that's what you can't help. Our stories are tied to yours and you have to pay attention to it, to the contract. When he died and came here, I had to come and save him. I was too afraid of you to come before, but I came now, and we will win. He's tied to you, but he's also tied to me. I can claim him and he can claim himself and we can both rise against you."

Lumi quieted her expression and a calm, calm smile drifted across her face. She was beautiful and decisive.

"Or I could kill you both here and be done with it. Wrap theories around that."

Kay clasped her hand – or she clasped his – and they fled to the back of the caves in the wake of the advancing Snow Queen. The temperature in the room dropped rapidly. They had seconds, maybe minutes if she wasn't in a hurry to kill them.

"Where is the weapon?" Gerda demanded of him. If they could use it, in any way at all, they could stop her, but Kay was staring at the wall in a kind of aging terror. "Kay!"

"The mirror."

"What, one on the wall?"

"The floor."

"Okay, how-?"

He was crouching again, shard in hand, murmuring something about only having a few left.

"Can we get you out of her contract somehow?" Gerda tried. He didn't answer. "Kay, please, she's going to kill us both."

"And everyone in the Mundy," he murmured.

"Everyone in Fabletown! You have to—"

He looked up at her and she was certain he was wide-eyed behind the black barriers. "But—everyone isn't…?"

"Who do you think sent me here?"

He slumped back to the ground.

"I finish the mirror." His voice didn't have any weight to it, petering out like a tired star. "And she uses it."

She bent and brushed his face with her hand, wanting to take the glasses off him again. It wasn't right, it couldn't end this way, with her quest failing and him waiting to be allowed to die.

"We'll think of something. It's definitely the mirror?"

"It is."

"Then finish it. Tell her I won't interfere. She's overcome what little I can do anyway."

There was a moment , a hiccup of sentiment, when it looked as though hope went out of Kay's face, then he nodded.

"It'll be fine," she assured, and he went back into the main room. Gerda stayed pressed in the back of the caves and waited until the woman had left. Then, waited until Kay came to her, still unblinkered by the black glasses.

"Gerda, there are two pieces missing. I've made- I've made faster progress than I thought and she said she would be back in two hours. It's been that."

They searched the floor together, hands splayed, on all fours; had there still been mirrors on the empty ceiling overhead, they would have looked like koi, making their way along their methodical invisible paths. The floor yielded nothing. Gerda finished her patrol and crawled to the ice pillar, tucking her legs under her and letting her head loll back. Kay dropped to sit next to her.

"They're in me, I think. I know she knows."

"So get them out," she said. She was very close to crying with frustration and the knowledge that she had inflicted hope on him.

"You don't think I've tried? I'm hardly… the person you knew. I've tried."

"You didn't…"

"On a regular basis. Never had the courage for open heart surgery though."

"And you've never found another way."

He looked at her wearily. He was being petulant but, she recognized, to him she probably seemed incompetent. "Don't you think I tried every way I could think of before coming to that?"

They sat in silence a moment until he stirred and moved to put the glasses back on. "She's coming."

"Just a moment." She leaned forward and pressed a hand against his chest, maintaining eye contact until he had to give up on avoiding it. The glasses hung loosely from his fingers. "We can make it out of this, Kay. We can."

He kind of shrugged skeptically and pushed himself up. The action loosened a flickering shard of glass, which fell from beneath his shirt and bounced on the floor. Gerda caught it deftly and hurried to one of the empty spots remaining. It fit.

"Just the other now," she said. Hope trembled in the air and she and Kay didn't want to look at each other for fear they'd see it in the other's eyes. So close. Lumi strode into the room, graceful as a willow, and cast her gaze over the floor.

"Just the one?" she noted, ignoring Gerda entirely. Kay stared fixedly at the far wall as he answered; the glasses had been left on the floor in his excitement and were out of reach now.

"Just one," he confirmed. Lumi nodded as if she had been expecting this and moved to his side.

"Your lover has encouraged some plot? Or perhaps it is still lodged in your eye - we'll soon have it out-" And she gripped the back of his neck, twisting him to face her fully.

"STOP!"

Whether it was the force of the command or sheer bemusement, Lumi did stop. Turned, even.

"You're still here? Oh gods, and weeping."

"Let him go. I'll get it for you."

Lumi smirked at Kay, amused. "She doesn't realize the nature of your contract? Also, girl, you can do this quickly?"

"Yes." Did it matter? The season would kill them both anyway. With the air of one making a great concession to something trivial, Lumi released Kay. He was staggering as he came back to Gerda, blinking hard, looking as if he had taken suddenly ill.

"… Gerda, please, just let me finish this and die. Please."

"Soon. Close your eyes." She leaned forward and, taking his head into her hands, kissed both of his closed eyes. It was the way the story ran; it was that tears had always healed hurts; and there was nothing else she could do to heal the break that viewing all the Snow Queen's evils would certainly cause in Kay. When she pulled away, the remaining shard had slipped down his cheek, so small it was hard to imagine it could do any hurt or taint an entire world for one life. She took the shard and placed it in his palm.

"We're going home soon. You just have to fill the contract," she told him. He walked unsteadily to the spot and, under the vigilance of the Snow Queen, pressed the last piece into the puzzle. The dazzling floor flared white for a second and ceased all movement, one brief moment where the floor was a perfect and untroubled mirror. Lumi stepped back to evaluate it, moving her hands for the first incantation of some spell.

She never got to the second, things happening in a mad rush of seconds. The framework of the puzzle trembled and rattled, much as it had when Gerda first entered the room, and Burke and Kramer came zooming up through the puzzle's expanse only seconds before the entire floor exploded.

The thousand and one shards of the puzzle leapt up into what looked like a long stream of one word, writ in foreign languages; it made its first priority winding itself loose and protective around Kay. Lumi summoned it towards herself with a puff of wind, a flick of her fingers, and this left Gerda open to rush to Kay. The man sagged like an empty shirt but gamely hurried towards the door.

Both of them kept their teeth clenched to avoid swallowing any of the dancing shards shimmering in the air. Fingers clutched at other fingers and shoulders, assuring themselves that the other was still there. Despite their silence, Lumi whirled on them, shouted a command, and an ice pillar leapt up in front of the door.

Gerda let go of Kay's hand a minute to cover her mouth, yelling "Burke!" They would never clear the ice pillar on their own. When she reached for Kay again, he was gone.


	15. Afterthoughts Chapter 15

He had come to a full stop, seeing the half-buried sword Gerda had left by the door, and swept it up, barely fumbling at the weight. The puzzle was immortal, as things of great power usually were, and this was to be the completion of the contract.

The sword blazed hot as he rushed back into the room, towards the storming Queen, with a thousand mirror shards manipulated by her anger and winds.

"Kay!" Gerda shouted, and he saw the witch's arms open wide. But Lumi was not his target. He dropped to one knee and drove the sword deep into the reforming mirror's heart, where he had sat as a child and been stolen from through promises he didn't understand. Lumi recovered quickly, snarling; her face terrible in anger. He scrambled backwards and Gerda rushed to pull him off the floor and through the ice pillar wreckage one of her angels had left. Running, with her dragging him by the hand, he could look back and see firsthand the impact of the sword.

Beneath its blade came a spreading red-orange crack in the ice, etching itself into the floor with an aim to permanence that would not be thwarted –

They rounded the corner then, the actual sword and Lumi lost to sight, but the crack followed. A growing heat came from the floor and cold shrank from it, melted on contact, and the stalactites on each mighty arch began to fall as the temperature of the sword met the Snow Queen's domain.

Kay moved independently now, motivated by fear, and Gerda recognized this, letting go of his shoulder. Her angels rushed behind and before them, dispatching Lumi's guards and keeping Lumi at bay with such ease that he wondered how it had taken her so long to come for him. The moment they crossed the threshold, tearing out into the wind-swept courtyard like bats from a belfry, one of the angels slammed the great doors behind them. It wouldn't hold long, in Kay's estimation, so the angel took out a second sword and set a fiery weld to the doorjamb and entire perimeter.

Kay saw them for the first time then, lit by flickering swordlight, and couldn't stop from staring at them in earnest as they finished their business.

"There's nothing to see…"

"There would be nothing to see anyway," Gerda reminded him. They kept moving down into the valley where Gerda said there was a town. Behind them, the castle listed dangerously downwards, like a bear sinking into a crouch. They headed south and he tried, quietly, to remind her in turn that he was still dead and this would pose a problem in going anywhere.

"No, you're not," she replied fiercely. "We defeated her. You finished the puzzle. That's the story. It doesn't end with you dying."

"She swore to kill me."

"So you have her death promise to look forward to, if she survived the collapse of her castle. No contracts, no curses."

There were gaps in what she said but he didn't want to think about them. Besides, there was warmth now, blood creeping through his veins at a faster pace.

"Why didn't you come sooner? Back then… "

She looked over at him. "I was scared. I would have died. You saved yourself and back then I thought you... wanted to be there."

He grew quiet. "I thought I did too, until the visions got… bad. I escaped and subsisted in the Mundy and… I never even thought to look for you." They walked on in silence for a while before Kay spoke again. "The curse is gone, but I might be…"

"Different. I'll take you as I find you," Gerda replied. It was a matter she had already given some thought. "Kramer, Burke, will you be heading back to… wherever you came from?"

Burke nodded. "But there is no need for you to walk back to the border of the worlds."

"But I walked all the way here. Surely there's no one-way portal."

"Some things must be done for the sake of a journey."

"…I could have teleported? All this way? I almost died!"

"You reached the destination and we followed you as soon as possible. You can ask for no better," Burke said, infuriatingly calm. She folded her arms.

"Take us back to Bigby then. No, the path? No. Anywhere we want to go?" She glanced at Kay, who shrugged as if to say she was calling the shots here. "What do you like, Kay?"

"Somewhere tropical," Kay said, after a moment. He had never been anywhere tropical but had often heard Mowgli and Cinderella describe them. "No volcanoes and no queens or goddesses. Or Fable communities. Somewhere with flowers and heat."

Gerda returned her attention to Burke. "That okay?"

"We are quite capable of that," Burke said placidly and Gerda seemed to realized that she hadn't said something. She became shy, ducking her head.

"And thank you. By the way. For the food and the safety and the flaming sword—which I'm sorry about losing."

"A pleasure, and do not worry, I'll retrieve the sword."

"Is the mirror repairable?" Kay asked.

"It is no longer your worry," the angel replied. And without another word, Gerda and Kay were in a sparkling glass-blue sea. Not on a beach, or boat, but in. The water was warm and no deeper than fourteen feet, clear straight down to the bottom.

Gerda jumped when Kay laughed: he was looking at the water below, rotating to stare at the sky, then back down at the sea floor, then –awkward- at her. His eyes were bright and joyous.

"I've never seen anything so perfect!"

"And the fact we're treading water-?"

"There's a shore! That way." He pointed with one dripping arm, gesture warped with enthusiasm. "And there are people—"

She saw him move compulsively for the glasses, the shadow that passed evanescent over his face when he couldn't find them, remembering that he could see now.

To save him embarrassment, she struck out for shore. He followed and the sound of his echoing strokes, his breath coming heavy after a few minutes of this, was more human than Fable. An existence beyond the story and she felt something in her soul finally come to rest. They had what everyone else did now. Closure, freedom, an openness about their choices.

Within minutes, their feet brushed the sand below, Gerda stepped on a sea urchin, and the story went merrily on from there.

###

And that concludes this little Fables fanfiction of mine. Thank you, very much, for reading, enjoying, or commenting (really, for that last one! There is so little fanfiction for this series and I like hearing from other fans...)

Roll credits: The Snow Queen and its characters (Gerda, Kay, Bae, the Snow Queen idea) are property of Hans Christian Anderson/his estate; Irene, Curdy, Lootie, and the rhyme Gerda sings are property of George MacDonald and used in his fairy tale 'The Princess and the Goblin'; all Fables characters (Bigby, Lumi, Totenkinder, Jack of Fables, everyone mentioned in reference to Fables, and this personification of Kay) belong to Vertigo, Willingham and anyone else who had a hand in. If I've missed anyone, assume they belong to the appropriate people.

And finally! This personification of Gerda, Kramer, Burke, the cursed man, and the crow gypsies are mine.

Thank you, again, for reading and reviewing.

Lisa/Crimson-Eyed-Angel99, 6 August 2012


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